Dose this affect Macs, I don't think so. If it doesn't then there is one more reason to use a Mac.

Infin-D was actually a very interesting program. I haven't used it since 1997 or so. That is way TheGigaShadow got the wrong impression that I was not familiar with it, I just forgot what it was like. It had things that I liked better then Carrara. I agree with what you say about texturing in Carrara, I don't like this aspect about it either. I hope it gets improved on a future version. I also agree with TheGigaSadow about Carrara being 10% ID and 90% RayDream. One thing that he failed to mention was that Carrara also took the ability to display several deferent user defined views on the screen from ID.

I would say that almost everything from Infini-D got incorporated in to Carrara. The Spline modeler is virtually identical except you get a heck of a better preview in Carrara and the speed is ten fold faster. There are some drastic changes, like the way you texture stuff is radically changed, but like the person that posted before me stated, I don't see you having to much of a learning curve. If you liked Infini-D, and you like Poser, you should love Carrara.

Sonnet Tech just announced a G-4 1Ghz upgrade for the Beige box last week they are supposed to come out with a later update for the B&W which is what I am looking for. The only draw back is that it will set you back $700 dollars just for that upgrade. I think you could get more bang for the buck if you spend your money like Scott suggested then on this one item, but at least the flexibility is there now if you find the need. I bought a dual 1.25Ghz from the latest crop from Apple because I just got tiered of weighting for such an upgrade, but I still kept the B&W around. I am using it less and less.

It's funny, but it seems that I am the only one here that was actually using Infini-D. I started with Ray Dream 3, than upgraded it to 4. Then I started using Infini-D and just loved it. It was very stable and it seemed more advanced then Ray Dream, when the company got assimilated I was devastated. To me the way you could map things in to geometry in Infini-D was a lot better than even Carrara 2. I would love to see them bring back some of that in to Carrara 3, it just made UV mapping a lot easer. I personally don't care much for the layers list in Carrara, it just seems awkward, and the Mapping tools are quirky. What really gets me is that Metacreations initial campaign to introduce Carrara was kind of deceiving in a way, they led every body believe that Carrara was going to have the best of RayDream and the Best of Infini-D, they pretty dumped almost all the code for Infini-D and kept all or RayDream's. Don't get me wrong I have always liked RayDream, but I think that Infini-D had much more to offer.

Scott: What Mac are you dumping, I just got a dual 1.25 GHz G-4 with a 20" Apple Cinama Display and it runs Carrara like a dream. For spot rendering it is almost instantaneous. Although I do understand that for what I paid, you could get a top of the line PC with a faster Chip and Bus. It came with a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card. I use Adobe y Macromedia stuff heavily and relay on ColorSync work flow so to me a PC was out of the question. Besides, I really dig OS X. I just got it last week so I haven't tried it on any thing to complex with C. But from my initial test it runs more than adequate. It dose seem to take advantage of the symmetric multiprocessing, in C and OS X.
I my self have been thinking to get a PC, but the ones at work really discourage me, since they seem so hard to trouble shoot and unstable. But I've heard good thing about XP.

In other words, a shadow catcher is an object that only "caches" the shadow. In other words let say that you want to render something on top of a photograph, but the photo has an object that the would have to interact with the shadow on something modeled in your seen. You model something to mimic the object on the photo to catch the shadow of your model and make it look more realistic once you do the compositing work on an image editor like Photoshop. It is only meant to distort shadows for compositing work.

The main problem that you might have is that you haven't included a reflection map on your seen. I ran in to this while getting acquainted with Carrara.

I like it.

I will second bluetone here, if you were to ad scorch marks or oil greasy stains in the joints it would probably work do give it more real world appearance. I like it so far.

Very nice. Good Work

I did download the sampler and they look great. I got to gather my funds, but I will be getting this in the future. Good work litst.
Willf, I just downloaded the zip file it expanded with stufit expander and I just used the browser tray to include the new folder, of course, I am using OS X 10.2 which doesn't really need the resource forks if the files have extensions.

I will check out the readme file. It looks like a good deal. Thanks.

Litst:
In theory, this pack would even provide a bigger value aside from getting all these wonderful shaders, if it actually shows you how you put them together. In other words, this package provides you with a recipe for all these shaders?
They look great.

You are right, this web site is very cool. I had some problems getting it to show right (OS X). I kept on getting a message telling me to get the Flash plug-in which I already have. But I was persistent and I am glad I was since I like what this guys did on there intro. Great idea and execution.

I agree with chuckerii, it's a cool mishap. I can see how something like this could come in handy.